US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

123

LLevitating about 12 hours ago 105 commentsRead Article on tomshardware.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

68% Positive

Analyzed from 3000 words in the discussion.

Discussion (105 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pushcx•about 12 hours ago

Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

saghm•about 11 hours ago

Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.

rigrassm•about 9 hours ago

> Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in.

That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.

More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!

> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.

On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.

Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.

saghm•about 8 hours ago

> More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!

I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.

> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.

Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.

robertlagrant•about 9 hours ago

Plot twist: that's what happened in this case.

polyterative•about 10 hours ago

I like the way you think.

bossyTeacher•about 9 hours ago

Maybe. Anyway, let us not forget that both of these actions are unethical.

rigrassm•about 8 hours ago

In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.

Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!

saghm•about 8 hours ago

Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.

nekusar•about 9 hours ago

Sure, theft is theft.

But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.

And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?

peddling-brink•about 11 hours ago

Was this explanation given with a wink and a nod, or did your neighbor always have 16MB of RAM?

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.

Scoundreller•about 9 hours ago

then they learned how to pick/shim locks

slumberlust•about 6 hours ago

This was common at our East coast Amazon site circa 2019 as well, but for monitors.

dylan604•about 10 hours ago

Was this before IT had the ability to look at all of the machines to see which suddenly had a different RAM config?

hypercube33•about 10 hours ago

I've worked at a bunch of orgs and no one is bothering to look at ram size changes they just note what it's at when they get a call.

gpm•about 10 hours ago

> from 8 to 16 MB

Yes

dylan604•about 10 hours ago

Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask

3eb7988a1663•about 10 hours ago

IT tech was probably the one who suggested the approach.

PorciiVorbesc•about 10 hours ago

>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft, since RAM stick have no legs to just wander around by themselves. If it's gone, then an employee stole it.

Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.

muragekibicho•about 10 hours ago

Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world.

My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.

AnotherGoodName•about 8 hours ago

The copper theft thing happens in western nations too. There's videos of people driving up in cars, license plates and faces showing and just to add to the stupidity they use bolt cutters to remove live power cables from EV charging stations.

The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y

The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.

thenthenthen•about 10 hours ago

Not only in the third world i would say?

Scoundreller•about 9 hours ago

Same but for a flexible thin-wall a/c refrigerant line :(

2b3a51•about 10 hours ago

Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much in a decade or so, or is this some maximalist prosecution claim?

RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.

PorciiVorbesc•about 9 hours ago

>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.

Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.

I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.

dlcarrier•about 4 hours ago

There's been ~40% inflation accumulated over the last decade. On top of that, storage and RAM prices have recently doubled or even tripled, as demand has outpaced supply.

A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070 and 32 GB of RAM.

I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.

avadodin•about 4 hours ago

I thought this would be about GPUs.

Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.

Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.

If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.

1970-01-01•about 11 hours ago

Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?

kube-system•about 11 hours ago

For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc

If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.

nortlov•about 10 hours ago

Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.

tastyfreeze•about 9 hours ago

We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.

formerly_proven•about 10 hours ago

You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.

(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)

kube-system•about 10 hours ago

Poorly run IT organizations certainly exist, even in F500. I’m telling you why it’s done, not that it universally is.

theandrewbailey•about 10 hours ago

I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.

goku_vegeta•about 11 hours ago

i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.

The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.

jerlam•about 6 hours ago

Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.

Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)

akerl_•about 11 hours ago

At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.

Ekaros•about 10 hours ago

At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.

tomasphan•about 10 hours ago

Because it runs Windows hehe

arcfour•about 11 hours ago

It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.

hypercube33•about 10 hours ago

45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.

Scoundreller•about 9 hours ago

and rowhammer etc mitigations microcode updates

personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.

Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.

Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...

phendrenad2•about 10 hours ago

Isn't Palantir a webapp? Full of maps and lists of stuff? Seems like a recipe for "chrome has stopped responding..."

walrus01•about 8 hours ago

I would also say in general that the federal government's software contractors are likely building tons of complex HTML5 / WebRTC / webassembly software packages that will choke a cheaper desktop PC. Ever viewed 20 cameras simultaneously in one browser tab in Frigate and seen the CPU usage? Now imagine something like that but for watching border sensor cameras and stuff...

dlcarrier•about 4 hours ago

That's usually a RAM limit, and only six computers had RAM swapped out of them.

taf2•about 11 hours ago

I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.

hammock•about 11 hours ago

The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you

Scoundreller•about 9 hours ago

obviously this isn't official advice, but are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them?

> Any small pleasure vessel leaving a United States port into international or foreign waters, without a call at a foreign port, does not satisfy the foreign departure requirement. Therefore, certain fishing vessels, cruises to nowhere, or any vessel that leaves from a United States port and returns without calling a foreign port or place, has not departed the United States.

Dunno how much emphasis to put on the word "port"

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/pleasure-boats-private-flyers/ple...

While it's a more inland water, Large vessels effectively can't transit through Windows/Detroit shipping channel without multiple border line crossings: https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...

snypher•about 8 hours ago

>but are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them

This is generally law enforcement all over. Given the power imbalance people don't question it due to fear of arrest/violence.

geetee•about 12 hours ago

Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.

thatfrenchguy•about 11 hours ago

US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.

lightedman•about 10 hours ago

US Person is not a tax definition, it is a security definition. holds up access badge with US Person written on it Taxes do not care if you're an American or not, you're still paying them.

jeffbee•about 12 hours ago

For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

like_any_other•about 12 hours ago

> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act

Brybry•about 10 hours ago

I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]

However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]

Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.

But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...

[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax

jeffbee•about 11 hours ago

Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.

parineum•about 10 hours ago

You forgot to mention that those people weren't considered "white" at the time.

wat10000•about 11 hours ago

Why is this so important to mention here?

wat10000•about 8 hours ago

You have to be a citizen to work for the federal government, with a few exceptions that I don’t think CBP falls under. So the answer is, they aren’t.

anamexis•about 5 hours ago

The very first job listing I found refutes this: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/882256600

Open to "U.S. Citizens, Nationals, or those who owe allegiance to the U.S."

wat10000•about 4 hours ago

US nationals are a tiny corner case that applies to people born in certain US territories. They’re functionally equivalent to citizens aside from not having the right to vote in federal elections.

As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.

geetee•about 6 hours ago

That's what I assumed, and found strange that the referenced article refers to him as a Chinese national. That said, that publication is also probably not very credible because I can't find anything backing up that claim.

wat10000•about 6 hours ago

I’d guess they’re saying that based on his place of birth and missed him becoming a US citizen sometime afterwards.

stephenlf•about 11 hours ago

Robin Hood?

arjie•about 10 hours ago

[deleted unsubstantiated text]

sdenton4•about 10 hours ago

This does not appear anywhere in this article. Just sowing misinformation?

arjie•about 10 hours ago

Hmm, I just googled and used what I thought was a local newspaper https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...

But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.

sva_•about 8 hours ago

> One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor

Double crime

londons_explore•about 11 hours ago

And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?

My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.

The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

genidoi•about 11 hours ago

It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.

trebligdivad•about 10 hours ago

IMHO a bigger worry is if they were opening the case then they could have modified it for spying or changing contents. I'd have thought stuff like this should have case alarm notification and inventory change alerts.

toss1•about 11 hours ago

Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.

Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.

And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.